A few days ago during a rally in Florida, President Trump raised a few eyebrows with yet another alternative truth. “You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden,” he said. “Sweden. Who would believe this?” To which the former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt tweeted: “What has he been smoking?”

Before The Donald clarified that his comment “was in reference to a story that was broadcast on @FoxNews” – a debunked documentary which falsely linked high crime rates to immigration – you would have been forgiven for thinking that he was referring to A Man Called Ove, the Oscar-nominated film by Swedish writer/director Hannes Holm about a suicidal widower who is “amazingly bad at dying”. Or to use Trump-speak: “bigly” bad at dying.

Despite the subject matter, A Man Called Ove is anything but “bigly” bad for everything about it is class. From the casting and performances to the droll one-liners and stark cinematography. And it is little wonder that it won the Cinema Audience Award at last year’s Guldbagge Awards Ceremony in Stockholm and that the lead actor Rolf Lassgård who plays the titular Man Called Ove picked up his second Best Actor Award, for both the film and his performance are pitched to perfection.

Ove’s life is thrown into chaos when his wife Sonja (Ida Engvoll) dies of cancer. “There was nothing before Sonja and there is nothing after her,” he concludes before launching into a series of failed suicide attempts. Firstly by gassing himself, then by throwing himself in front of a train and, most comically of all, hanging himself with a rope which fails to live up to its promise of “universal usage” suitable for “every need”.

Then the fickle finger of fate – what Ove calls “the sum total of our stupidity” – spins the bottle and changes his life for the better in the shape of new neighbours Parvaneh (Bahar Pars), her “loser” husband Patrick (Tobias Almborg) and their two daughters Sepideh and Nasanin (Nelly Jamarani and Zozan Akgün) whose unexpected arrival fills his empty life with noise and colour, laughter and disorder.

This last point is crucial. For Ove is a “nit-picking obstructionist” who rigidly enforces the prohibitive bylaws of his local Neighbourhood Watch committee – from which he was unexpectedly usurped from the chair by a Volvo-driving rival. A vehicle which he rates as woefully substandard to his beloved SAAB but marginally superior to a German Audi which he dismisses as having “four zeroes on the bonnet and one behind the wheel.”

Slowly, through a series of flashbacks, which chart his relationship with both his wife and his father (Stefan Gödicke), we begin to piece together why the “big heart” of Young Ove (Filip Berg) has hardened into a fist. And as he creaks open his doors to his gregarious Persian neighbour Parvaneh, a gay waiter who was booted out of his family home for the crime of coming out, and a stray cat, Old Ove’s icy demeanour melts away and he rediscovers what he knew to be true but had lost sight of after the death of his wife: “No one manages completely on their own. No one.”

Video courtesy of: Music Box Films

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Peter Callaghan
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